Habits of 'frightfulness' in the dealings with external proletariats

On the north-western frontier of Christendom the same story repeats itself. The first chapter is the peaceful conversion of the English by a band of Roman missionaries, but this is followed by the coercion of the Far Western Christians by a series of turns of the screw which began with the decision of the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664 and culminated in the armed invasion of Ireland by Henry II of England, with Papal approval, in 1171. Nor is this the end of the story. Habits of 'frightfulness', acquired by the English in their prolonged aggression against the remnants of the Celtic Fringe in the Highlands of Scotland and the bogs of Ireland, were carried across the Atlantic, and practised at the expense of the North American Indians. (p. 473)

as quoted in Arnold Toynbee's 'A Study of History, Volume 1'

The seductiveness of astrology

In the history of the Babylonic Society, for example, the terrible eighth century B.C., which saw the beginning of the hundred years' war between Babylonia and Assyria, seems also to have seen a sudden great advance in astronomical knowledge. In this age Babylonic men of science discovered that the rhythm of the cyclic recurrence, which had been patent from time immemorial in the alternations of day and night, in the waxing and waning of the Moon, and in the solar cycle of the year, was also discernible on a vaster scale in the motions of the planets. These stars, which were traditionally named 'the wanderers' in allusion to their apparently erratic courses, now proved to be bound by as strict a discipline as the Sun and the Moon and the 'fixed' stars of the firmament in the cosmic cycle of the magnus annus; and this exciting Babylonic discovery had much the same effect as our recent Western scientific discoveries have had upon the discoverers' conception of the Universe. 

The never broken and never varying order that had thus been found to reign in all the known movements of the stellar cosmos was now assumed to govern the Universe as a whole: material and spiritual, inanimate and animate. If an eclipse of the Sun or a transit of Venus could be dated to some precise moment hundreds of years back in the past, or predicted with equal certainty as bound to occur at some precise moment in the equally remote future, then was it not reasonable to assume that human affairs were just as rigidly fixed and just as accurately calculable? And since the cosmic discipline implied that all these members of the Universe that moved in so perfect a unison were 'in sympathy'--en rapport--with each other, was it unreasonable to assume that the newly revealed pattern of the movements of the stars was a key to the riddle of human fortunes, so that the observer who held this astronomical clue in his hands would be able to forecast his neighbor's destinies if once he knew the date and the moment of his births? Reasonable or not, these assumptions were eagerly made, and thus a sensational scientific discovery gave birth to a fallacious philosophy of determinism which has captivated the imagination of one society after another and is not quite discredited yet after a run of nearly 2,700 years. 

The seductiveness of astrology lies in its pretension to combine a theory which explains the whole machina mundi with a practice which will enable Tom, Dick and Harry to spot the Derby winner here and now. Thanks to this twofold attraction, the Babylonic philosophy was able to survive the extinction of the Babylonic Society in the last century before Christ; and the Chaldean mathematicus who imposed it upon a prostrate Hellenic Society was represented until yesterday by the Court Astrologer at Peking and the Munejjim BBashy at Istanbul. (pp. 429-430)

In Arnold Toynbee's 'A study of history, volume 1'

The dialectics behind the growth of civilization (according to Arnold Toynbee)

"In studying the growths of civilizations we found that they could be analysed into successions of performances of the drama of challenge-and-response and that the reason why one performance followed another was because each of the responses was not only successful in answering the particular challenge by which it had been evoked but was also instrumental in provoking a fresh challenge, which arose each time out of the new situation that the successful response had brought about. Thus the essence of the nature of the growths of civilizations proved to be an elan which carried the challenged party through the equilibrium of a successful response into an overbalance which declared itself in the presentation of a new challenge. This repetitiveness or recurrency of challenge is likewise implied in the concept of disintegration, but in this case the responses fail. In consequence, instead of a series of challenges each different in character from a predecessor which has been successfully met and relegated to past history, we have the same challenge presented again and again. For example, in the history of the international politics of the Hellenic World, from the time when Solonian economic revolution first confronted the Hellenic Society with the task of establishing a political world order, we can see that the failure of the Athenian attempt to solve the problem by means of the Delian League led on to Philip of Macedon's attempt to solve it by means of the Corinthian League, and Philip's failure to Augustus's attempt to solve it by the Pax Romana, upheld by a Principate. This repetition of the same challenge is in the very nature of the situation. When the outcome of each successive encounter is not victory but defeat, the unanswered challenge can never be disposed of, and is bound to present itself again and again until it either revives some tardy and imperfect answer or else brings about the destruction of the society which has shown itself inveterately incapable of responding to it effectively." (pp. 417-418)

in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History, Volume 1"

Getting the creeps

If one has ever experienced a bug crawling over one's hand and had a very visceral response to it, I consider that some of that response relates to the subjectivity of that little creature transforming you into a surface to crawl upon, reducing the you to an it. That tiny little agent transformed you into an object. 

Intelligence in math terms

 Intelligence lies somewhere between 1 and 2's asymptote.

Drugs are good for business

"Casino owners love customers on benzodiazepines; they don't get upset when they lose and keep gambling" (p. 227).

"Until it lost its patent, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson doled out LEGO blocks stamped with the word 'Risperdal' for the waiting rooms of child psychiatrists. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines. In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children--including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays" (p. 228).

In Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma"

The conclusion of the Bonus March

"By 1932 the nation was in the middle of the Great Depression, and in May of that year about fifteen thousand unemployed and penniless veterans camped on the Mall in Washington DC to petition for immediate payment of their bonuses. The Senate defeated the bill to move up disbursement by a vote of sixty-to to eighteen. A month later President Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans' encampment. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the troops, supported by six tanks. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was the liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton was in charge of the cavalry. Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas in to the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames. The veterans never received their pensions" (p. 188).

from Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma